Sunday, February 20, 2005

My Utopia: The DTTM

Since my friend Dara is one of the main people who sucked me into this whole blogging thing, it seems only right that something she did should inspire an entry, no? Yes!
Dara has been working on some small quilts for a challenge with the theme "What's Your Utopia?". As I was lying in bed this morning, contemplating the move from horizontal to vertical, my mind turned to this topic and I had An Idea. I have a vision in my head of what I would do for this challenge if I were making an entry. Unfortunately, that probably won't happen because a) Cruise Brain!!!!!!! and b) post-Cruise Brain, the time available for making a quilt, photographing it, having slides made, doing the entry paperwork, and getting the entry form and slides turned in by the deadline make my chances of accomplishing the task very Not Good.
My thought is that I don't think there is any one place that ever could be Utopia for me. I've thought of a possible solution to that, but more on that later. First, why can't I choose any one place? Well, I'll tell you...
Cities? For me they fit perfectly with the phrase "nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there". I love all the stuff there is to see and do in a large city....book stores, shoe stores, other stores, great restaurants, museums, theaters, wonderful people-watching opportunities. But the one time I actually lived right in a city, it nearly killed me. I still think of that time as The Year Of The Migraines. Those horrid "lie very still in a dark room and try not to move so I won't puke" headaches were a weekly occurrence that year. And when I'd go away for the weekend, as I'd leave the city and start heading into places with grass and trees and clear sky, I could feel something very hard and tight inside start to relax. Aaaahhhhhh.....birds instead of honking horns, the wind in the trees instead of neighbors arguing...relief!
Now I live in the country. Waaaaaay out in the country, in Middle-of-Nowheresville. It's a nice place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit here. I'm calmer and healthier and more relaxed here, but I must admit I miss the variety of experience in a city. The days are all a lot alike here. Most of the people are a lot alike too, but not very much like me. I have friendly acquaintances here rather than true friends.
Most people would then say, well why not the suburbs? Isn't that a compromise? But to me that seems like the worst of both worlds instead of the best. You still have to drive to get to the real City Stuff (although admittedly not as far as *I* have to drive), yet you don't have the kind of peace and privacy you get in the country.
Then there are the places I travel to....tropical beaches, mountain retreats...and a part of me thinks they might be wonderful places to live. But realistically, I'm sure they have their problems too. If I DID live there, I have no doubt there'd be things I'd love about it and things I wouldn't like at all.
So that brings me (finally!!) to my Utopia idea....teleportation. You know, like the transporter machines on Star Trek. I think someone needs to invent a safe, affordable teleportation device, one we could all have in our own homes. Come on...that's not too much to ask, is it? It's the perfect solution. It would change lives!
I can see it in my mind. It would look like a phone booth. Not a wimpy, open, modern phone booth, but a REAL phone booth, the kind where Clark Kent could duck in and shed his gray suit and horn-rimmed glasses and become Superman without anyone around him noticing. You'd step in, close the door, dial up your destination, hit a button and *poof*...there would be a hum and some shimmering lights and seconds later your molecules would reassemble hundreds, or even thousands of miles away. Or hell....five or six miles away for that matter! No reason you couldn't use the teleporter chamber instead of the car to pop over the library and back!
It would all but make cars and planes obsolete. The air would be cleaner in no time. And it wouldn't matter where you lived because you could be anywhere as fast as anywhere else! Want to live on a tropical island in the Pacific, work in Silicon Valley, have dinner in Tokyo, and see a show in New York? No problem!
Obviously there would need to be public booths in public buildings and on street corners, so you'd have a way to get home again from wherever you went. And there'd have to be some privacy settings so that people would have to get permission to beam into someplace private. But all those things could be worked out, don't you think?
So that would be my Utopia quilt....a patchwork of places I'd love to be...a city, a peaceful countryside, a tropical beach, a mountain top...and right in the center of it all would be the Deluxe Teleporting Travel Module, (the DTTM), with racing stripes, and you'd see just a sparkle and twinkle right in the center of it that would be me, popping out to a Caribbean beach and then popping back home in time to sleep in my own bed tonight. Aaaahhhh...Utopia.

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